Tech

Ultimate Ears Boom: The Speaker Jambox Wants to Be

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Logitech UE Boom Wireless Speaker

A Bluetooth Speaker With Oomph

Priced at $199.99, the Logitech Ultimate Ears Boom is a wireless speaker that delivers excellent sound quality for the price. Besides sounding great, the speaker can connect to another Boom to become a stereo pair.

Power Button

The power button is on one of the ends. The Bluetooth pairing button is close by.

Volume Controls

You can't miss the volume buttons

Carrying Ring

The ring on the other end lets you attach the Boom to something else.

Stereo Pair

Two Booms can be combined as a stereo pair through the UE Boom app. You can also set them up to simple be "doubles" of each other.

Stereo Separation

The two speakers can be as far as 50 feet away from each other -- useful for parties.

Horizontal Placement

The Boom is weighted so it won't roll away if placed horizontally.

Versatile

The footprint of the boom varies depending how you place it.

Forget Jambox. It's officially been replaced, at least to my ears, by the Ultimate Ears Boom: A portable wireless speaker that sounds almost as good as a much larger home system. It also has a brilliant stereo mode that lets you set up two Booms to act as a stereo pair. And it has a sizzling design.

Ultimate Ears made its name with in-ear headphones that are custom-made to the wearer's ears. It began by catering to audiophiles (mostly sound engineers), then spread to a more mainstream crowd when Logitech acquired it. The Boom ($199.99) isn't its first wireless speaker, but it's by far its best.

From its appearance, the Boom is the anti-Jambox. It's shaped like a cylinder instead of a box, and its design implies durability: The speaker grille has a weave that's almost like armor, plus it has an unscrewable ring on one of the ends, letting you attach the speaker to a string, wall mount, keychain — anything you want, really.

Most of the time, though, you'll want to put the Boom on a table or desktop, stood on one end. It looks great standing tall, and its footprint is very small (it's a mere 2.5 inches in diameter). But if you want to rest it horizontally on its curved side, you're more than welcome — the sound doesn't suffer, and the speaker is weighted so it won't roll away.

Speak to Me

When you power up the Boom for the first time, it tells you its active with a short, distinctive drumbeat. You hear it again when it pairs with your phone, only louder. It's a very nice touch: Not only is it a clever way to confirm pairing that works in any language, but it also shows off the Boom's bass chops, which are impressive.

Logitech was kind enough to let us check out a pair of Booms, but I first dived into some single-speaker listening. From the first notes of Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror," I could tell the Boom was something special. The initial airy tones really filled the conference room I was in, and I wasn't even at half volume.

Then the "snapping" beat began, and Jackson started to sing. The snaps were crisp and clear, and Jackson's lyrics always came through perfectly, never overpowered by the music. As I increased the volume to maximum, I couldn't detect any distortion.

The maximum volume is mighty loud, by the way. When cranked up, the Boom was uncomfortably loud for the conference room I was in. I'm confident it's up to the task of keeping a party going in a much larger space. It couldn't rock out a gym, but it's all you need for the party at your apartment this weekend.

I moved on to stereo listening. To be clear, the Boom technically plays in stereo (not mono) as a single speaker, although obviously the separation is barely detectable. When you add a second Boom in the mix, though, things go from "pretty good" to "yowza!"

Double Your Boom

As a Bluetooth Smart device, the Boom can pair with a free app called UE Boom. You don't need it for basic listening, but you do to listen in stereo. What the app does is tell one Boom to act as a "slave" to the "master" Boom (the first one you pair with). From there it's easy to select between a "stereo" (L and R) or double (L/R and L/R) configuration. You can switch L and R speakers with a tap, too.

The Boom scored a hit as a single speaker, but it knocked it out of the park as a stereo pair. I first cued up Sum 41's "Hooch," since the intro to that song has very clear channel separation, to test the stereo configuration, which was working fine.

Then I jumped into Green Day's instant classic, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." The two Booms rendered the song powerfully, every guitar strum coming through loud and clear. Vocals sounded excellent, with the stereo pair creating a "virtual" speaker in the middle, just as it should. They did a fantastic job.

To see if I was just imagining things, I compared the Boom — in both one- and two-speaker configurations — to a Big Jambox. Although the Boom competes more directly with the little Jambox on price, from what I heard it was ready to play in the big leagues.

Even a single-speaker Boom played better and louder than the Jambox. Listening to the Tragically Hip's "Ahead by a Century," the Boom was such a powerhouse that the Jambox sounded tinny by comparison. In stereo, it was just embarrassing: the Boom simply blew it away.

The Boom's app, however, wasn't as great as the sound. In stereo mode, it was a little finicky, and the sound faded out a couple of times — usually shortly after I paired the second speaker. The app also seems to occasionally flip from stereo to double mode for no reason. Just bugs, but annoying ones.

I didn't get a chance to thoroughly test the battery on the Boom, but the indicator dropped from 40% to 30% after about an hour of listening at half volume (UE rates it at 15 hours). Another weakness of the app: It can show you the battery level of only one Boom.

I'm confident the app will improve, mostly because the Boom is a product that speaks too loudly to ignore, and like any talented emerging artist, I'm certain it'll find an audience. For a wireless speaker that offers outstanding sound quality for the price, the Boom is in its own class.

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